Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement · Sam Webster Harris | Growth Mindset Psychology

You Didn't Choose Your Attachment Style, but Here's How You Can Change It - With Jessica Baum

March 6, 2026·53 min·2 clips

Core wounds become self-concepts laid down in your body—but disconfirming experiences with reliable people can challenge and change these patterns.

The episode starts by treating attachment as the hidden structure underneath a lot of human behavior. It argues that connection is not a luxury but a requirement. Early care in the first 18 months is presented as the place where threat, safety, and relationship patterns begin to form. The host uses baby monkey experiments and orphaned wild animals to make the point feel concrete. Jessica Baum joins as the guest and brings the focus to attachment styles and how they can be understood. The show makes a point of saying Baum is the author of Anxiously Attached, a book the host relied on during his own research on attachment. That gives the conversation a practical, curious tone rather than a detached academic one. The discussion turns to mirror neurons and what it means to take in another person through expression, presence, and essence. From there it broadens into the idea of resident circuits, where people are not just remembered but internalized. The guest describes an inner community made up of the people we carry with us. That includes parents, but also people who have hurt us. The idea is not presented as a clean theory with tidy edges. It is more like a working model the show keeps testing aloud as the conversation moves. The host pushes on what internalization means in lived experience. Baum answers by treating internalized people as accessible sources of healing and energy. The discussion keeps circling back to how attachment patterns get replayed later in life. It suggests that the ways we relate as adults are often repetitions of very early relational training. The episode is interested in more than diagnosis. It is trying to give listeners a lens for seeing themselves and other people more clearly. The result is a brisk, talky, psychologically dense conversation that stays grounded in ordinary human examples. Even when the language gets a little metaphysical, the episode keeps returning to a practical question: what did early attachment teach us, and how are we still living inside that lesson?

As heard by us

A focused look at how early attachment shapes the patterns people carry forward.

Attachment gets the clearest treatment here: how early care shapes a person's sense of safety and threat, their relationships, and even temperament, and how those internal figures keep living inside the inner world.

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Why you'd press play

If attachment keeps showing up in your relationships, start here.

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